In this project-centered course, Darden's Ron Wilcox and BCG's Thomas Kohler will walk you through a real-world case, from problem statement to detailed analyses. You'll use all three lenses (cost, customer value, and competition) to recommend an optimal price—and then adjust to market disruptions. Utilizing the concepts, tools and techniques taught in previous Specialization courses—from basic techniques of economics to knowledge of customer segments, willingness to pay, and customer decision making to analysis of market prices, share, and industry dynamics—you will practice setting profit maximizing prices to improve price realization. You'll finish the course with a portfolio-building project that demonstrates your pricing prowess.

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SK

Sep 01, 2017

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Excellent business and application oriented course

De la lección

Curveball

This week, you will respond to new developments in the LED light bulb market: a new competitor and new regulations. Just like in real life, you'll need to adjust your strategy when the competitive landscape changes and new regulations emerge and reconsider the retail marketplace and reevaluate the B2B market. You'll also head out into your own "real world" and do some detective work about the LED bulb market in your area and relate those finding to the case. We'll finish the course with BCG pricing experts sharing their insights into what makes pricing such a rewarding field.

Jean Manuel Izaret

Ronald T. Wilcox

Thomas Kohler

Associate Director, Pricing

Transcripción

I am Matt Beckett an Associate Director with Boston Consulting Group, focused on pricing and revenue management. I have over 15 years of experience in pricing doing a mix of strategy, implementation, as well as client capability building in across a range of industries. Everything from consumer goods, to airlines, to steel manufacturing industrial companies. A key reason I'm so interested in pricing really gets to the immediate impact you're able to have. The decisions that you make, when it comes to pricing, roll into the market very quickly and you're able to see, was this a good decision and what does this do for my company and for the customer? Another important thing is pricing issues, as I'm sure many of you have seen, they're some of the most complicated issues businesses can see. How do I work through my own pricing? How does it interact with my other products, with my customers, with the competitors out there? Trying to work through all of those and stay ahead of your competition, stay cutting edge. Is a really critical thing, but also a very complex thing that frankly is a lot of fun to work through, and figure out what's the right answer and how do you keep improving on that. Final reason I've really enjoyed pricing, personally, gets to the fact that to do pricing really well, you need to be closely aligned with a business' overall strategy. Pricing is a lot of how do you communicate to the customers in the market. What is your brand mean? How is it valued? How should it be valued? And so, you really have to understand deeply the core elements of the business' strategy to get the pricing right. I've been asked at times, what's been the most interesting pricing work that I've done? One of the pricing projects that I most enjoyed was working with a home services company. There, we were actually pricing along the entire company life cycle. Acquisition pricing for new customers, working through customers in their trial period, starting to work through loyal customers, but even adapting price and discounting for customers that may have had service interruptions or been unhappy and at risk of change. Oftentimes when it comes to pricing, people think, great, I can change prices, make more profit for the company and drive more value. Absolutely agree, that's a very important part of pricing, but this particular experience also showed, we were able to shift the pricing for both acquisition customers and those that were at risk of leaving and grow the overall customer base. That drove value for the company but also it turned into a need for more technicians in the field to service these customers. And so not just that we make pricing moves to drive more value, boost more bottom line profits, we actually grew over 200 new technicians in the field because of this. And so pricing helped grow the company and provide more opportunities for jobs as well. A final observation, the reason I continue to be excited about pricing is that a market continues to change, continues to advance and pricing, frankly, is getting even more important out there for businesses. I've seen that complexity grows in terms of data availability, in terms of competitors that are out there in the market, in terms of how quickly things change. And I've also seen the visibility at the most senior levels of companies for pricing, pricing decisions, pricing strategy is larger than I've seen it anytime in the past. That means they'll be a lot more opportunities for pricing, a lot more complex issues, and frankly, a lot more opportunities for other people to get into pricing. Clients to build up their pricing teams, build up their sophistication and continue to advance with the art and the science of pricing strategy out there.